Effective stage magic produces the illusion of an event that did not actually happen, at least not in the manner implied by the illusion.

The implied explanation is "magic", while the actual explanation, invariably more complicated, is quite different. Most members of the audience know that the implied explanation is wrong. They try to imagine how the effect was produced. Very few believe the "official" explanation.

In other, blacker forms of magic, the manipulative element remains but the polarity of the audience is reversed. Most members of the audience "know" that the implied explanation is correct and do not try to imagine how the effect was produced. Very few disbelieve it. If the events of September 11, 2001, were all part of an elaborate piece of stage magic, in effect, how could it have been arranged? This article explores one possibility. The name of the trick is "Ghost Riders in the Sky." It begins with a peek behind the curtain on that fateful day.

Flight 11
The morning of September 11 dawned bright and clear over Boston's Logan Airport as crews arrived for the first flights of the day. The departure lounge for American Airlines Flight 11 was already filling with passengers when John Ogonowski, the pilot, and Thomas McGuinness, the first officer, arrived to board their Boeing 767 and begin the pre-flight check.

As they walked through the lounge, Ogonowski casually scanned the waiting passengers, a longtime habit. Nothing out of the ordinary.

In the cockpit, he and McGuinness worked through the long checklist and, when they came to engine start-up, the two giant General Electric turbofan engines roared into life. The weather reports were good all the way to Los Angeles. It would be a routine flight.

At 7:45 the flight crew closed the cabin doors and the 767 began to taxi out to the runway. Clearance came minutes later and, at 7:59, the engines opened to full throttle and the 767 became airborne. It climbed into clear blue skies, leveled at 25,000 feet, and headed west toward Los Angeles. Ogonowski called up the coordinates for Los Angeles on the flight control computer, then engaged the INS/autopilot system. A flight attendant brought coffee to the cockpit and stayed to chat briefly, before resuming her duties.

The flight continued normally until 8:27, nearly half an hour into the trip. At that point Ogonowski's chest felt tight and he experienced difficulty breathing. Was it a heart attack? He glanced nervously at McGuinness, thinking that if the symptoms got worse, he should warn the co-pilot that he was having a medical problem. But McGuinness' face was white and he appeared to be gasping for air. Then he vomited. "We have a situation," declared Ogonowski, trying desperately to think. There were shouts and screams coming from the passenger compartment behind the closed cockpit doors. His mind seemed to be clouding over and breathing was now impossible. He managed to say, "Call the flight attendants," before passing out. McGuinness' head was already lolling to one side.

Back in the passenger area, the last flight attendant to lose consciousness, sank slowly to her knees before passing out in the aisle. The aircraft smelled of vomit and feces. Except for one or two passengers lying in the aisles, most remained in their seats. They appeared to have all fallen asleep, but they were dead. Everybody in the aircraft was dead.

Back in the cockpit, pilot and copilot sat dead in their seats, eyes staring blankly at the deep blue sky above the cockpit windows. The aircraft continued to fly normally, when suddenly the numbers on the inertial navigation system display changed. Instead of the coordinates for Los Angeles airspace, new numbers jumped into place. The aircraft banked steeply to the left and began a slow descent, adding another 100 mph to its airspeed.

In the distance, the New York skyline was growing steadily larger through the cockpit windows, though no one saw it. The aircraft, continuing to descend, headed for lower Manhattan.

By the time the 767 crossed the East River, it would have been all too clear where the aircraft was going. The World Trade Center Towers loomed steadily larger, dead ahead, through the cockpit windows. At 8:45, the Boeing 767 slammed into the North Tower. A huge ball of flame, burning jet fuel, blossomed from the southeast side of the North Tower. The passengers and crew of Flight 11, having been gassed, were now cremated, along with hundreds of office workers in the North Tower.

At 9:03, 18 minutes later, even as thousands of New Yorkers gaped upward in astonishment and dismay at the burning North Tower, another Boeing 767, approaching from the southwest, crashed into the South Tower. United Airlines Flight 175 had also departed from Boston Logan that morning at 8:15.

At 9:45 a third aircraft crashed into one corner of the Pentagon building. At 10:00 am, a fourth crashed in a field near Pittsburgh, apparently unable to complete its mission.

Within minutes of the first crash, major networks carried the developing story. Four apparent suicide attacks involving large passenger aircraft had just struck two of America's most important landmarks. Asked for their impressions, people on the street described it as "unreal." The scale was unprecedented. The drama swept away the debris of ordinary life, shocking Americans into numbness, then anger.

In the days that followed, the story of four cells of Arab terrorists emerged with unprecedented speed. The names of the hijackers were revealed, along with their affiliation or "links" to al Qaida and the dreaded Osama bin Laden. Soon, Bush would declare his "war on terrorism." Soon American forces would be heading for Afghanistan. Soon Israel would be re-invading the West Bank and Gaza.

The September attacks acquired, almost from the start, an apocalyptic dimension, as if the hijackers stood proxy for the Four Horsemen themselves. This analysis explores the possibility that the aircraft were hijacked not by persons physically present in the cockpit, but by a simple combination of two hi-tech methods. In such a case, there would be no Horsemen, only "ghost riders," recalling the American ballad, Ghost Riders in the Sky.

Analyzing the Terror Attacks
The discrepancy between the account I have just given of the hijackings and the one reported in the media is obvious and, to many, highly improbable. How could anyone question such an open-and-shut case? There had been the decisive and amazingly rapid unfolding of the FBI investigation, wherein the domestic agency had pretty well solved a case involving 19 terrorists in just two days. (It took them several years to find one terrorist - the Unabomber.) There had also been the steady stream of timed press releases and Pentagon briefings, the disclosure of a war plan by the White House within days of the attacks. What could they be but the work of a well-prepared government? Besides, people who had only just begun adjusting to the "new reality" would hardly be in a mood to exchange it for something far worse. Nevertheless, the "unreality" of the attacks themselves would seem to join seamlessly with the unreality of the subsequent drama.

In a following section I will examine the technical feasibility of hijacking large commercial aircraft electronically, as described in the opening scenario. I do not claim that this is what actually what happened on September 11. But even less would I claim that the attacks were planned and carried out by "Arab terrorists."

I claim only that the method described below amounts to one of several methods, albeit among the most efficient, for converting passenger aircraft into flying fuel bombs. I must therefore also claim that the rush to judgment following September 11 was, at best, foolhardy on the part of the Bush administration and, at worst, disastrous for America. In that event, the evidence compiled here points to elements within the power structure of the US government and it can only be concluded that the United States itself has been hijacked.

Before explaining how a hi-tech hijacking might be feasible, it would be appropriate to disclose some findings related to the attacks for clues they may contain that something quite different from hijackings by "Arab terrorists" was in progress that day.

The historical context: First and most important, no attack blamed on any recognized "terrorist" group, whether Palestinian, Basque separatist, Irish nationalist, Tamil Tiger, Red Army brigade, or what have you, was ever carried out without the group responsible claiming responsibility. The whole point of the attack is to publicize a cause. The only exception to this rule in the history of terrorism is the mysterious Al Qaida, led by the equally mysterious Osama bin Laden. Robert Fisk, the well-known British reporter, gave voice to the same opinion: "They left no message behind. They left just silence." In Fisk's opinion, this was quite out of character for any terrorist organization. (MacIntyre, 2001)

If Al Qaida was responsible for the attacks, what possible reason would bin Laden have for not claiming responsibility? The White House claim that Al Qaida's purpose was to inflict "nameless terror" on America is deeply contradictory. The only other terrorist acts for which none of the "regular" organizations took responsibility, namely, the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, as well as the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, were also blamed on Al Qaida. What reason would bin Laden have for imagining that the terror inflicted by Al Qaida on September 11 would be blamed on anyone but Al Qaida, let alone be "nameless?" It simply fails to make sense. Worse yet, bin Laden has repeatedly denied involvement in the attacks. On September 11 bin Laden said "This terrorist act is the action of some American group. I have nothing to do with it." Later, on September 28, "I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable [sic] act." (Ummat, 2001)

Nevertheless, the White House claimed to have "links" between Al Qaida and the September 11 attacks, secret information that, for reasons of "national security," could not be disclosed to the public.

Intelligence leaks: Another discrepancy in the September 11 attacks is apparent to anyone who has followed the history of "terrorism." The sheer size of the operation as outlined by the White House, the high degree of coordination involved, and the need for absolute secrecy, is not one, but two, orders of magnitude greater in scale than anything previously attempted by any terrorist group. Indeed, even the previous attacks blamed on Al Qaida were relatively simple operations involving the clandestine transport of explosive materials (by boat or car) to the target site. In the large-scale operation of September 11, the requirement of secrecy was especially important.

The scale of the operation, however it may have been achieved, was more suited to a large, well-organized intelligence agency, with as many as 50 field agents involved, each privy to one or more aspects of the plan. With such a large operation, leaks are inevitable. The two cited below both point to a very different source for the attacks.

According to Ha'aretz, Israel's largest daily, two employees of Odigo, an Israel-based messaging service in one of the WTC towers, received email warnings of the attack two hours before impact on September 11. (Dror, 2001) The employees immediately informed the company, which cooperated with Israeli security services, as well as American law enforcement agencies, giving them the source of the message. No follow-up on this story has ever been made available, which leads one to believe that the message did not come from a "terrorist" source: If such a source had been suspected, much less proved, the administration would not have hesitated to use the item in its "war on terrorism."

An interesting report of another leak alleges that "A US military intelligence report revealed details of an internal intelligence memo linking Mossad to the WTC and Pentagon attacks. The memo was in circulation three weeks before the attacks." (Stern, 2001) It pointed to a threat that Mossad was planning a covert operation on US soil to turn public opinion against the Arabs." David Stern, an expert on Israeli intelligence operations, stated, "This attack required a high level of military precision and the resources of an advanced intelligence agency. In addition, the attackers would have needed to be extremely familiar with both Air Force One flight operations, civil airline flight paths, and aerial assault tactics on sensitive US cities like Washington." Stern also pointed out that the attacks "serve no Arab group or nation's interest, but their timing came in the midst of international condemnation of Israel . . ."

The virtual celebration: A highly suspicious occurrence was the airing of a videotape supposedly shot in Palestine on the day of the attacks. The video shows Palestinians celebrating something. The media claimed that the Palestinians were celebrating the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The only problem with the tapes is the time of day. Shadows thrown by the stands and buildings in the vicinity of the celebrants clearly show the local time to be approximately noon. At the time of the attacks, however, it was already 5:00 pm (daylight time) in Palestine. At that time of day (and year), the angle of the shadows would be at most 30 degrees from the horizontal and readily visible on the video as deep shadows.

Since the tape is unquestionably a fake, shot at some other time and on some other occasion of celebration, it must be asked how it got into the hands of the American media (via an "independent producer") so quickly, unless it had been prepared in advance of the attacks. There is no other explanation for this anomaly.

Planted evidence: Another difficulty arises in the matter of evidence discovered by FBI investigators in the parking lots of airports used by the hijackers. In more than one rental vehicle, field officers recovered copies of the Qur'an and aircraft flight manuals. In a context where the White House was stressing the "sophistication" of the attackers, as well as the high state of organization and coordination necessary to carry them out, it would seem reasonable to assume that all operatives would have been extensively briefed on the importance of leaving no trace of themselves or their mission (in pursuit of "nameless terror"). Such a briefing would certainly include all personal possessions, religious documents, flight manuals, and so on. The rental vehicles would be left as clean as they were when they were rented. No Muslim, (especially, one supposes, a "fanatic") would ever leave a Qur'an in a rented vehicle, especially if he knew he would not be returning to it.

Come to think of it, why would any terrorist organization with such a high level of competence rent cars in the first place? After all, it would be simpler (and no less reliable) to take a cab to the airport.

Again, there are very serious discrepancies between the facts as reported and on-the-ground realities.

The Lebanese playboy: Ziad Jarrah, the alleged pilot of United Airlines Flight 93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania), presents those who seek to understand the September 11 attacks with serious difficulties. As revealed in a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) investigative report, first aired in November, 2001, Jarrah was the playboy son of a wealthy family in Lebanon. (MacIntyre, 2001) The family was only nominally Muslim and Jarrah, if anything, more so. He loved to go dancing with other young people of his set in nightclubs and even had a steady girl friend, hardly practices of a believing Muslim, let alone a fanatical one. Linden MacIntyre, host and reporter, traveled to Lebanon to interview the Jarrah family, then to Hamburg, where he discussed Ziad's behavior during the months leading up to September 11 with Jarrah's landlady. The Jarrahs were completely mystified by their son's alleged role in the hijackings. The landlady, who seemed rather fond of him, was also mystified.

Jarrah loved the good life but had one over-riding passion, to study aeronautical engineering and (probably) to learn how to fly. He went to Hamburg to study and it was there, according to his landlady, that he began making mysterious evening trips to Harburg, sometimes not returning until dawn. Harburg was the address of Mohammed Atta, one of the most notorious of the alleged hijackers, and the person who, MacIntyre opines, probably recruited Jarrah for a special mission. If this is true, although we do not know what Atta may have told Jarrah, June of 2000 finds him in Florida, taking flying lessons (light aircraft only) and discussing with his room-mate (also interviewed for the program) what it would be like to fly a large commercial aircraft.

Anyone with a reasonably active imagination can come up with several different stories that may have been fed to Jarrah (apart from the standard Al Qaida recruitment scenario) causing him to spend a few nights in Harburg or to take flying lessons in Florida. Such behaviour is easily induced by any reasonably competent field officer: A lovely and very cooperative lady in Harburg, as well as the promise of a position as private pilot to a wealthy Middle Eastern businessman currently living in Florida.

On September 9, just two days before the attacks, Jarrah telephoned his uncle in Lebanon. He sounded normal and reasonably happy, according to the uncle. He stated that he would be flying back to Lebanon in two weeks for a party which his family had planned. A new Mercedes awaited Jarrah, an anticipatory wedding gift which his father had purchased for him. MacIntyre professed no little puzzlement over the discrepancies. "It becomes more perplexing as each layer of the mystery peels away."

I will return to the alleged hijackers in a later section.

The 1993 Trade Center bombing: The most important target of the September 11 attacks was undoubtedly the twin towers at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. These had been the target of a prior attempt at bombing in February, 1993. Among those charged with the bombing was Mohammed Salameh, a student who lived in Jersey City at the time.

On February 26, 1993, at 12:18 pm, a powerful explosion, originating in parking level 'B' beneath the WTC twin towers shook the buildings, killing seven people and trapping thousands of workers inside for hours, forcing them to breathe heavy smoke. Within a week, the FBI had arrested Mohammed A. Salameh, along with a friend, Nidal Ayyad, as prime suspects in the blast. Salameh had been traced through a fragment of metal found in the WTC parking garage. It bore the serial number of a Ford Econoline van belonging to a Ryder rental agency in Jersey City.

Salameh, it turned out, had certainly rented the van in question. Unlike most terrorists who rent vans to blow up large buildings, he reported the van stolen to Jersey City police on February 25 (the day before the blast). Unfortunately, he was unable to supply the license number, having left the rental documents in the stolen vehicle. He also reported the theft to the rental agency, attempting in the process to retrieve his $400 deposit on the vehicle. On the next day, even as everyone learned of the WTC bombing, Salameh again telephoned Ryder, obtaining the plate number and filing a second report to the police, this time with the correct number. On the face of things, the youth was behaving just like someone who had no idea that his missing van had been used in the World Trade Center bombing.

This case gets even stranger. Salameh and Ayyad attended a small mosque on the second floor of a building in downtown Jersey City. The Imam was Shaikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. The shaikh was also arrested and brought to trial in separate, closed proceeding. A police search of the mosque revealed no hidden bomb-making or related material. A search of Salameh's apartment had the same negative result.

Police did, however, discover bomb-related wiring, instruction sheets and traces of explosives in the apartment of a "friend" of Salameh's. On the day before the bombing, an acquaintance of Salameh's in Jersey City, one Josie Hadas, had hired him to rent a van to move a certain cargo. Hadas, an Israeli citizen, was taken into custody by police, but was soon sent back to Israel and (apparently) cannot be found to this day. (IIIE, 2001)

The main source of damaging testimony at the trial was delivered by FBI informant Emad Salem, a former Egyptian army officer, who had become close to Shaikh Abdel Rahman and his circle of friends, infiltrating the group on behalf of the FBI. He testified that he had been involved in assisting with the bomb. The jury found the pair guilty of the blast, with Abdel-Rahman being tried in separate proceedings. The verdict was based on circumstantial evidence of a conspiracy; none of the suspects ever being placed by witnesses, or forensic evidence, at the scene of the crime. (Pringle, 1994)

After the trial, Salem disclosed a very different story, that "We was start [sic] already building the bomb which is went off in the World Trade Center. It was built by supervising supervision from the bureau and . . . we was all informed about it and we know that the bomb was start to be built." (Morales & DeRienzo, 1995)

Those who are unfamiliar with the activities of large intelligence operations should be aware that frame-ups and other "dirty tricks" are part of regular operations. (Ostrovsky & Hoy, 1990) They are relatively easy to carry out, for the most part. For example, in the present case, Salameh could have been directed by Hadas to deliver the goods (innocuous items) to an address somewhere in Jersey City, where he would have to enter a building to report the delivery. While he was inside, the van would be stolen, then driven to another location to be prepared for its ultimate mission.

The missing passengers: In most of the web sources (CNN, 2001) (WRH, 2001) (IIIEb, 2001) for passenger lists, the names of the hijackers did not appear. There are, of course, a number of reasons why we might not see the names of the hijackers. One is that the airlines all decided, in releasing the lists to the media, to delete the names of the hijackers from the lists so as not to dishonor the dead, reproducing the lists as consisting of "victims" only. No statement to this effect appeared in conjunction with any of the lists. Another reason is that the hijackers may have used phony names. Yet the passengers are usually identified not only by name on the lists, but their place of residence and occupations are also included. None of the entries give "terrorist" as occupation. It may be a bit of a stretch, but it is just possible that the hijackers' names do not appear on the passenger lists because they were not aboard the aircraft in the first place.

The missing black boxes: Each of the Boeing aircraft involved in the September 11 attacks was equipped with the standard "black boxes," a flight data recorder (FDR) and a cockpit voice recorder (CVR). There is no known instance, prior to September 11, 2001, of a terrestrial airplane crash from which the essential flight and voice data were not ultimately recovered.

Only one of the eight black boxes was ever recovered, namely the CVR of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania. According to ABC News, "The voice recorder was said to be heavily damaged and the manufacturer was being asked to help with further analysis. The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was reported to have hit the ground in excess of 500 miles an hour."

Black boxes are built to withstand g-forces of up to 3400 Gs, generated by a deceleration of 108,800 f/sec/sec. An aircraft traveling at 500 mph that crashes into the ground or a building will have all motion arrested within one-tenth of a second, at the very least, yielding an average deceleration of at most 7,330 ft/sec/sec, about 7 percent of the rated maximum. Heat resistance for the units is 1100 degrees Celsius over a thirty minute period. Temperature would not have been a factor in the Pennsylvania crash, but even the fireball resulting from the WTC impacts had a temperature no greater than 1000 degrees Celsius. (NTSB, 2002) The heat lasted no longer than the jet fuel and temperatures may not have reached half that value in the insulated confines of the black box housings. In any event, the buildings each collapsed in less than half an hour from impact.

There can be little doubt that had the black boxes been recovered, they would have all the information necessary to confirm that hijackers did, indeed, commandeer the four aircraft on September 11. There have been no further reports in the media about the contents of the Flight 93 CVR. The FBI, which claimed that the tape had sounds of screams and shouts on it, has refused to release it. (Quinn, 2001) It might be added that the presence of such sounds on the CVR is perfectly consistent with what would be heard in and from the cockpit of Flight 93 in the few minutes following implementation of the hijacking method described below.

The missing interceptors: It has been standard policy for many years to intercept any aircraft within minutes of it being reported off course. The request is made by an air traffic control (ATC) operator as soon as he or she notices that an aircraft has deviated from its flight path. Failure to contact the pilot (which would have been the case under both the alternate scenario and under the White House interpretation) results in a request by ATC to the military (NORAD) to intercept the aircraft (FAA, 1998) (FAA, 2001). Interception is automatic, does not require approval by any authority higher than the FAA liaison official at NORAD, and takes anywhere from five to 15 minutes, depending on the initial separation of target aircraft and the nearest operational base. Upon arrival, the interceptor waggles its wings to elicit a response from the pilot of the off-course aircraft. The pilot is also instructed to make a visual check of the cockpit area.

New York and Washington are among the most heavily guarded places in the United States. For the first time in the history of this policy being implemented, no interceptors were sent up, in spite of the fact that not one but four aircraft were involved.

It would have taken approximately five minutes for any fighter from, Andrews Air force Base to intercept the aircraft that struck the Pentagon, for example. Aircraft were on standby on the morning of September 11, according to the official air force website, although the contents of the site were changed two days after the attacks to say that no aircraft were available that morning (a strange circumstance, considering the sensitivity of the area and the number of fighters stationed there). (Ruppert, 2002)

The air force had not five minutes, but more than an hour to carry out interceptions.

Virtual hijacking
The natural assumption of every single viewer of the September 11 attacks was that human beings were at the controls of the aircraft. What could they be but hijackers? Since they were also committing suicide, what could they be but terrorists? But what at first sight seems impossible sometimes turns out to be not only possible, but the actual explanation of events. Although I shall be using an in-principle argument, it must be recognized that the "devil is in the details" and that certain features of the scheme I have worked out might have to be implemented in another way. About the main conclusion, however, there can be little doubt. The thing is do-able.

In a modern commercial airliner like the Boeing 757 or 767, all control signals from the pilot and co-pilot go through the flight control system (FCS) (Safford, 1975) (Spitzer, 1987). The heart of the system is a computer with three processors to ensure reliability of operation. Each processor is able to run separate versions of what is essentially the same software. Only one processor runs at a time, but the pilot can switch from one processor to another if he suspects a malfunction. Each processor, like any multi-mission computer, has an operating system.

If something goes wrong with the computers or with the flight control system generally, a manual override is initiated by the pilot. This allows the pilot to fly the aircraft manually -- unless he is dead.

The simplest possible scheme for converting a modern commercial airliner into a flying fuel bomb involves two elements: a) two small canisters of lethal gas hidden in the aircraft's ventilation ducts and triggered either by a timer or by radio signal, b) a small information implant (three numbers) in the flight control system and a means to trigger it.

The agent of choice for part a) would probably be fast-acting sarin, a lethal nerve gas that, at the dose levels to be used in a hijacking, would incapacitate every human being in the aircraft within a minute of first breathing the gas. Should the oxygen masks all pop out of the ceiling, it would make no difference to the outcome. One breath of the deadly gas would be more than sufficient. The symptoms described in the alternative scenario are all typical of sarin poisoning. Sarin degrades chemically within a short time of use, being undetectable thereafter.

The information implant mentioned in part b) would be new coordinates (latitude, longitude and altitude) in a form used by the inertial navigation system (INS), which is part of the aircraft's flight control system (FCS). The central problem of this analysis is to determine which of two ways of achieving this goal is most efficient. In what I call the "custom job," a pre-installed virus-like code implant in the flight control computer(s), triggered like the gas canisters (either by timer or by radio signal), sends new coordinates to the INS. No more than a few lines of code would be required: there would be a time/signal check followed by an instruction to replace the Los Angeles coordinates by the ones stored in memory location so-and-so. In the "installed base" method (Vialls, 2001), the software already exists in the FCC operating system, awaiting its use (presumably) as a counter-hijacking facility. This software would be able to read the new coordinates directly by radio from the ground. It has proved impossible to document this possibility from reliable sources.

In the custom job, installation of the unfriendly software and hardware would be carried out on selected aircraft during routine maintenance periods. The agents carrying out the installation might pose as mechanics or even cabin cleaners. In the cockpit they would install the special software patch in all three FCS processors, if necessary. In a maintenance port of the plane's air supply system, they would install two custom-made sarin gas canisters, each with its trigger. Such installations are actually the easy part of the overall operation, depending on how much "cooperation" the organization receives. Although it would not be crucial, access to aircraft maintenance and location schedules would be very useful to the agents, giving them more time for installation on specific aircraft, instead of having to make the installation on additional aircraft, which might or might not be used.

The components of the FCS that concern us here are the flight control computer, the INS, and the autopilot. During most commercial flights, the pilot places the aircraft on autopilot, as guided by the INS. The autopilot manages the aircraft's control surfaces to guarantee a smooth, level flight, automatically compensating for various forms of disturbance, such as turbulence and other factors. Autopilots have been around for over fifty years and have grown increasingly sophisticated with time. They do a superb job of what might be called "local control," keeping the aircraft on its present heading, altitude, and so on. However, autopilots have no idea where they're going, so to speak. That information must come from the INS. The destination coordinates, stored in the FCC, may be called up by the pilot and sent to the INS. Routinely, commercial pilots engage the INS and autopilot together, the INS continually sending new directions to the autopilot to keep the aircraft on course.

Inertial navigation systems have been around for approximately thirty years and, like autopilots, have been the subject of tremendous development and sophistication. According to Edward Safford, dean of American avionics, "The plane can fly any course in the world without the need for a navigator or external navaids." (Safford, 1975) Present INS capabilities are even more sophisticated, positioning an aircraft over the center of a runway hundreds of miles from the point of insertion. Such accuracy is adequate to accommodate the precise three-dimensional coordinates of the impact sites of the WTC towers and the Pentagon.

The agency carrying out the attacks would, after clandestine installation of software implants of the kind outlined above, simply trigger the whole operation when it was determined that the target aircraft was flying in INS/autopilot mode. The gas cannisters would then be triggered and after about five to ten minutes the software implant would feed the new coordinates to the INS. The flight would be managed smoothly, the direction being changed as soon as the new destination coordinates were in place. The changes in direction that took place on September 11 would be visible on ground radar (transponders or no transponders) as a "hard left" or a "hard right." (This is precisely how Air Traffic Control personnel described the turns.) By inserting more than one set of coordinates, it would also be possible to program a more complicated flight, with several changes of direction.

Virtual phone calls
However an electronic hijacking might be managed, the organization responsible would also be sure to add other elements to the basic plan, not only developing lists of ghost riders, but sending fake cellphone calls from some of the passengers. The following analysis focuses on Flight 93, from which more alleged cellphone calls were made than from the other three flights combined. It could be called the "Cellphone Flight." The calling operation would be no less complex and require no less planning than the virtual hijacking itself.

Any analysis of the cellphone and "airfone" calls from Flight 93 must begin with some basic, high-altitude cellphone facts. According to AT&T spokesperson Alexa Graf, cellphones are not designed for calls from the high altitudes at which most airliners normally operate. It was, in her opinion, a "fluke" that so many calls reached their destinations. (Harter 2001) In the opinion of a colleague of mine who has worked in the cellphone industry, it was a "miracle" that any of the calls got through from altitude. An aircraft, having a metal skin and fuselage, acts like a Faraday cage, tending to block or attenuate electromagnetic radiation. One can make a cellphone call from inside an aircraft while on the ground because the greatly weakened signal is still close enouigh to the nearest cellsite (relay tower) to get picked up. Once above 10,000 feet, however, calls rarely get through, if ever.

Here is the statement of an experienced airline pilot: "The idea of being able to use a cellphone while flying is completely impractical. Once through about 10,000 feet, the thing is useless, since you are too high and moving too fast (and thus changing cells too rapidly) for the phone to provide a signal." (AVWeb, 1999)

People boarding aircraft for the last decade or so have all heard the warnings to turn off their cellphones for the duration of the flight. The reason for this has nothing to do with interference with aircraft radio equipment, which is all electronically shielded in any case. Instead, the FCC has requested that airlines make this rule, owing to the tendency for cell phone calls made from aircraft at lower altitudes to create "cascades" that may lead to breakdown of cellsite operations.

The cascade problem is more likely at altitudes of 10,000 feet or lower, where reaching a cellsite, although still a touch-and-go matter, is more easily accomplished. However, because of its superior position, the cellphone may reach several cellsites at once. This can create problems, as software that determines which site is to handle the call makes its judgment based on the relative strength of calls. If the call is made from an overhead position, it may well not be able to distinguish relative strength at different cellsites. When this happens it is designed to close off the calling channel, selecting another channel in its place. But the same problem of deciding which cellsite should handle the call also occurs on the new channel, so the new channel is closed, and so on. One by one, in a rapid cascade that would last only seconds, all the channels would be closed, leading to a network-wide breakdown. [Fraizer 2002]

Although it was practically impossible for any calls to get through early in the hijacking of the Cellphone Flight, when it was at or near cruising altitude, there would be no theoretical difficulty after its slow descent over Pennsylvania. But it was then just as unlikely that no cellphone network cascades would occur. On the morning of September 11, no such cascades occurred. Two more elements of doubt thus weigh against the official account.

It must also be remarked that the alleged hijackers of the Cellphone Flight were remarkably lenient with their passengers, allowing some 13 calls. However, it would seem highly unlikely that hijackers would allow any phone calls for the simple reason that passengers could relay valuable positional and other information useful to authorities on the ground, thus putting the whole mission in jeopardy.

Continue to 'Ghost Riders in the Sky' Part 2
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